Domestic goddess has criminal skeleton in the cupboard

Nigella Lawson

"Domestic goddess" Nigella Lawson has come across an aspect of her otherwise illustrious family's past that may prove difficult to digest.

Lawson is the latest public figure to have her ancestry probed for television - a look into the family tree that reveals a criminal past.

She discovered that a member of her family, who founded the famous Lyons empire, came to England as a fugitive from justice.

The revelation about Lawson, 49, comes in the latest instalment of the popular BBC1 show Who Do You Think You Are?

Researchers for the programme have discovered from documents that her great-great grandfather on her mother's side, Coenraad Sammes, was a convicted thief in his native Amsterdam.

He was caught stealing and dealing in lottery tickets and was sentenced to prison. In 1830, before an appeal could come to court, he fled the Netherlands and brought his family to London.

Lawson said that she was surprised by the revelation but was nevertheless proud of her family.

"You can't really imagine a worse start than having to flee a country because you're going to be put in prison and yet it was the impetus that was needed," she said. "It doesn't really matter whether he was a persecuted innocent or a complete no-goodnick, that's sort of irrelevant. What matters is that things turn on such small accidents of fate. When the moment of fate happens, suddenly a whole family moves in a different way. What my family history teaches me is that you make your own life. How you start off is not how you need to end up."

Sammes changed his name to an anglicised version, Coleman Joseph, and to avoid capture he persuaded his young daughter Hannah to take the name Ann. It was Ann who met and married Barnett Salmon, the founder of the J Lyons company. The firm, as the programme reveals, expanded to include teashops, restaurants, hotels and supermarkets from 1898 until the late 1970s. All this was started by profits that Salmon made selling tobacco in the East End of London.

Lawson also discovers that her maternal grandfather Felix bore a similarity to her husband Charles Saatchi. Felix opted out of running the family business in order to become an art buyer and was also, like Saatchi, notoriously shy of the limelight.

Lawson's family have lived in West London for generations but because her family are Jewish she knew that her roots must lie aboard. She had believed that her family had "exotic" Iberian-Sephardic roots. But archivists said she descended from the lower-class, cattle-dealing Jews from Germany and eastern Europe.

- INDEPENDENT